Charlotte Sussman -- new podcast episode

I spent some time with Charlotte Sussman recently talking about our shared passions of sailing and literature.  Charlotte is a Professor of English at Duke and recently the author of Peopling the World.  One website explains: Through a literary lens, Professor Charlotte Sussman examines the 18th-century shift in Britain’s understanding of the value of human reproduction, the vacancy of the planet and the necessity of moving people around to fill its empty spaces. In Milton’s 1667 “Paradise Lost,” Adam and Eve are promised they will produce a “race to fill the world,” a thought that consoles them after the fall. By 1798, the idea that the world would one day be entirely filled by people had become a nightmarish vision in Malthus’s “Essay on the Principle of Population.” Sussman places these and other texts in the context of debates about scientific innovation, emigration, cultural memory and colonial settlement.